Elsie’s key rattled in the door and she let herself noisily in, shouting, “Yoo-hoo?” sounding nervous. “Why aren’t the lights on? Yoo-hoo?” Hurriedly Craig and Penny dressed themselves, straightened themselves to greet his mother.
Elsie hardly noticed how flushed they looked. Penny was sure she would smell the sex in the air. Everything smeared across her son’s rueful, grinning, daft-looking face.
They watched some telly and went to bed. They had hard, longed-for sex and it wasn’t as good as the run-up had promised. They had spent too long watching Wheel of Fortune and all that stuff. They lay together, dishevelled and cross. This was the first bad sex they’d had. It was the moment Craig chose to tell Penny he had licked her innermost essence. She had transformed him magically with her superpowers.
“You what?” Her voice was hard, but there was a tremble in it. As if she had been caught out, Craig thought with satisfaction.
“You’ve passed on your powers to me,” he claimed.
“I don’t know what you’re on about,” she said, turning away from him to where the bed was cooler. She was pressed up against the wall, right into that horrible Baywatch poster. She considered ripping it down and telling him how demeaning she found it. Penny scratched at her stomach, at her inner thighs. Tonight she was alive with itches, which she put down to Craig’s scratchy stubble. But that’s kidding myself, she thought. Lately I’ve always got these itches and I’ve got to sort it out. Find out where they’re coming from.
“You do know, Pen,” he said in a low voice. It was the voice he used when they had sex. She let him get away with that then. He thought she thought it sexy, but it wasn’t really. Like that bloke off the aftershave advert. He said filthy things as he thrust into her and she let it in one ear and out the other. If that’s what got him off — she shrugged. Now he was talking like that without the excuse of sex. “I’ve seen you, you know. I’ve watched you use your powers.”
“My powers?” she repeated, and hoped she sounded sceptical enough.
“Your superpowers.”
Penny made her hands into fists under the blankets. Her black fingernails tingled, a quite different itch to that under her skin. This was an older tingling and one she hadn’t told many people about.
“Craig…I don’t want to talk about this.”
“I watched you the other night. When you were out in the garden. I was pissed, but I know what I saw.”
“I’ll tell you things in my own time, Craig. You’ve no right spying on me.”
“I wasn’t spying. I caught you. You can make things happen. Like magic.”
“I know,” she said quietly.
“It’s like having superpowers.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“But it is! Who else can do that?”
“I don’t know.” She sounded surly. I sound stupid, she thought. I should just tell him to fuck off. Or I should explain, calmly and rationally, that my powers, if that’s what he wants to call them, are something that I’ve always had. The power of making things fly through the air, mend themselves or to come to life has been something I’ve nearly always practised. To me it isn’t out of the ordinary. If that’s superpowers, then it’s Craig’s superpower to be able to fix tellies. It’s Andy’s superpower to desire other men. It’s Elsie’s to have ginger hair and work down the spastics. If Penny could have been bothered, this is what she would have explained to Craig. Instead she said, “Oh, man. Look. Life isn’t a comic strip.”
He lay quiet. He moved apart from her. That side of the bed sagged with his silence.
Oh, great, she thought. I’ve put him in a huff.
“I had a hideous cunt of a teacher tell me that when I was eleven. She thought I lived in comics. I did live in comics. I told her that. And that it was better than living in fucking Newton Aycliffe. That scraggy bitch laughed and told me that life wasn’t a comic strip. She lived on a farm somewhere out beyond Darlington. She came to school filthy, smelling of sweat. My mam was disgusted at such a dirty-looking teacher.”
Penny hadn’t heard him say as much as that before. Maybe the superpower he’d picked up from her was talking.
“Anyway,” she said, after a thoughtful silence. “Even if I do have superpowers — which I don’t want to say I have or haven’t, or even discuss right now, right? Even if I do have some kind of…power, then what makes you think you’ve picked them up off me?”
He turned round in the bed to face her again. “Because I love you, Pen,” he said.
She thought he must have gone mad. Or he was taking the piss. It was too awful. Here was a man professing his love. It was something she had waited for. He was offering her his ordinariness, his safety. But at the same time he had made himself seem mad and dangerous, talking about superpowers. It was like a cruel joke.
“I’m sorry, Craig,” she said, and sat up. What time was it?
“What’s the matter?” he asked, alarmed.
Penny was out of bed in a flash, hunting around on the carpet for her jeans and shirt. She was crying, she realised.
“No one’s ever said that to me,” she sobbed. “I’m going home now. Right now. Where’s my boots?”
His mind raced. He went, “But…but...” and it was as if the effort of telling her had robbed him of the power of ordinary speech. Inwardly he shook, full of adrenaline and disappointment. It was like being someone in a film. This was Craig, he had vowed
